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Ecclesiastical polity is the government of a church. There are local (congregational) forms of organization as well as denominational. A church's polity may describe its ministerial offices or an authority structure between churches. Polity relates closely to ecclesiology, the theological study of the church.
However, Saint Augustine, one of the Doctors of the Church, influenced the Church with his theory of minimal involvement in politics, according to which the Church "accepted the legitimacy of even pagan governments that maintained a social order useful to Christians as well, and to the extent that the freedom of the Church to carry out its ...
The consultative leadership of the church, in both the diocese and the parish, usually comprises a Pastoral Council [92] [93] and a Finance Council, [94] [95] as well as several Commissions usually focusing on major aspects of the church's life and mission, such as Faith Formation or Christian Education, Liturgy, Social Justice, Ecumenism, or ...
The relations between the Catholic Church and the state have been constantly evolving with various forms of government, some of them controversial in retrospect. In its history, the Church has had to deal with various concepts and systems of governance, from the Roman Empire to the medieval divine right of kings, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts of democracy and pluralism to the ...
In canon law, the power to govern the church is divided into the power to make laws (legislative), enforce the laws (executive), and to judge based on the law (judicial). [6] An official exercises power to govern either because he holds an office to which the law grants governing power or because someone with governing power has delegated it to ...
In the Latin Church, positive ecclesiastical laws, based directly or indirectly upon immutable divine law or natural law, derive formal authority in the case of universal laws from the supreme legislator (i.e., the Supreme Pontiff), who possesses the totality of legislative, executive, and judicial power in his person, [14] while particular ...
Papal supremacy is the doctrine of the Catholic Church that the Pope, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, the visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful, and as pastor of the entire Catholic Church, has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered: [1] that, in ...
Positive ecclesiastical laws, based directly or indirectly upon immutable divine law or natural law, derive formal authority in the case of universal laws from promulgation by the supreme legislator—the supreme pontiff, who possesses the totality of legislative, executive, and judicial power in his person, [7] or by the College of Bishops ...